Google Wave Attempts to Modernize Email

Google Wave is a new communication tool that the search giant bills as “what email would look like if it were invented today.” While the plan to modernize email is laudable and ambitious, Google Wave’s whiz-bang features can feel confusing and chaotic to new users. However, if regular people can make the leap that Wave does from email’s message-based system to conversations as co-editing a single document, Wave could revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate online.

Email’s problems

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet and the World Wide Web, instant messaging, homepages, search engines, forums, blogs, Wikipedia, eBay, Craigslist, and YouTube. Despite its age, email hasn’t evolved that much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail: a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. But this pattern doesn’t scale well to in-depth conversations among groups of people. Here’s why.

Email propagates multiple, disconnected copies and versions of messages. You type an email message, address it, and send it. A copy of that message stays in your sent email box, and appears in your recipient’s inbox. Your recipient replies and optionally includes a copy of your original message in her response. A copy stays in her sent box, and appears in your inbox. You reply to her reply, and cc: another recipient and send the next message. In three email interactions, seven copies of the same message appear in differing states for three people. It’s a mess.

There’s no easy way to exchange rich content like maps, videos, or images via email. Ever receive an email message from a family member with an enormous image attachment that takes forever to download? Or emailed a link to a web page that broke or became unclickable? Email attachments and URLs are not a good way to share content like photos or maps or videos with others easily. Furthermore, email software represents messages differently — some display HTML and images, others just plain text. No one’s email always looks the same.

There’s no easy way to reply to a subsection of an email. Jack sends Jill an email telling her all about his latest project, then asking when she’ll be in town, and where she’s staying when she gets there. An email message is just a flat document, so it’s not easy for Jill to reply to ONLY the questions Jack asked. She could reply to his message and manually copy and paste just his questions and position her answers directly after them, but that’s a lot of work that most people don’t do. Often questions and individual points that need addressing via email get lost because there’s no easy way to reply to a specific section of a message.

There’s no easy way to privately respond to specific people within a group email. When Jack and Jill do finally meet up, Jane invites them over for dinner via email. Jack wants to reply only to Jill and ask what bottle of wine they should bring to dinner. Reply to all doesn’t work, because Jane will see it, so he has to manually edit the recipient list on the private email and create yet another copy of the invitation.

While Google Wave isn’t a full-on replacement for email (yet), understanding email’s problems given the capabilities of the modern web is a good framework for understanding what Google Wave can do.

Wave’s solution: Conversations as live documents

Rather than pass back and forth multiple copies of messages, Google Wave hosts a single copy of a conversation (a lowercase “wave”) that everyone involved edits. Wave displays the latest version of that conversation to everyone in the group in real-time, even as it’s changing. That means if Jack has the wave he sent Jill open on his computer, and Jill is typing her responses across the country on her computer, Jack sees the wave change keystroke by keystroke.

Google Wave treats an email conversation with several recipients and senders as a document with several editors and writers. If you can make the conversations-as-documents and documents-as-conversations leap along with Wave, the system makes 100% more sense.

In other smaller ways, Google Wave addresses the rest of the problems with email. Using Google Wave, all the participants in a conversation have the ability to reply to a specific question or statement inside a wave inline, add rich media like videos, images, maps, and polls in-wave, reply privately inline to a subset of participants, and play back earlier versions of a wave sequentially, so that you can revert to an older state of a given wave, or see how it changed over time.

This short video demonstrates how Wave offers a better alternative to email in an everyday office interaction.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo&hl=en&fs=1&]

Wave’s pitfall: It’s confusing

Right now, Google Wave’s biggest pitfall is its complexity. Parody web site EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com jokes that heady topics like radiocarbon dating, neoclassical economics, and polymodal chromaticism are easier to understand than Wave. The joke is funny because the initial Wave confusion is a universal experience. The first waves you’re bound to receive from your friends and co-workers, fresh on Wave, will say things like “I don’t get it” and “This is weird.”

There are a few good reasons for the initial confusion:

Conversation-as-document is a whole new paradigm with no existing precedent. For most computer users, editing a Microsoft Word document and instant messaging are two very different activities. Google Wave fundamentally conflates messaging and document-editing, so there’s no obvious existing parallel for what you do in Wave to what you do now. It’s not quite email, and it’s not quite writing a Word document. Google Wave is both and neither, and that feels totally foreign, and makes Wave difficult to explain.

Conversation trees, or non-linear message threads, are chaotic. Forums, blog comments, email threads, instant messaging sessions are all linear conversations, where the most new message appears at the bottom (or top) of the list. You read them sequentially, in one direction, one after the other. Google Wave’s inline reply capability turns a conversation into a tree that can grow any number of branches. When wave participants add new information to a wave on different branches at different times, the non-linear nature of a busy wave can feel overwhelming and unnatural.

Document versioning is foreign (to non-programmers). Software developers have been using file versioning tools like the one built into Google Wave for decades now. But most computer users don’t version their files or use a feature like Wave’s playback in any other context, so its utility isn’t immediately obvious.

Wave isn’t done yet, so it has gaping holes of missing functionality. Basic functionality that you’d expect from a messaging and document-editing platform is currently missing in the Wave preview, which is currently pre-beta software. The lacking features makes Wave seem less useful than doing those things “the old way.”

Google released the Wave preview, accessible by invitation only, to start getting feedback from users and developers before the product is fully-baked. If you’re interested in giving Wave a spin, ask a friend who’s already in to give you an invite (each user gets invites to hand out to their associates), or put your name in the hat here.

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